All's Well That Begins Well

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The era of the impresario is all but ended in the commercial theater. Practically everything that comes to Broadway nowadays is funded by committee and imported wholesale from somewhere else. Off-Broadway, however, the American theater's boldest, most ambitious, quirkiest, most pedantic and at times most infuriating showman holds sway more forcefully than ever. Joseph Papp has built, at the New York Shakespeare Festival, a personal barony more than an institution. Although he sometimes describes his $14 million annual operation as the biggest "regional" theater in the nation, its six-theater complex and staff of 125 stand in the shadows of his outsize personality and mercurial but galvanic enthusiasms. Over the years Papp, 66, has brought live drama to prime-time network TV, invaded Broadway with musicals (A Chorus Line, Pirates of Penzance, Drood), introduced new playwrights and plays from David Rabe (Streamers, about Viet Nam) to Keith Reddin (Rum and Coke, about the Bay of Pigs invasion) and provided stage-acting challenges for Hollywood stars including Robert De Niro and William Hurt.

Last week Papp unveiled what he described as his biggest project yet: a six-year, 40-show plan to stage the complete plays and poetry of the writer to whom he has remained unwaveringly committed throughout all his kaleidoscopic activity, Shakespeare. Said Papp: "There are fewer new plays I want to do, audiences are enthusiastic for these classics, and actors need to play these parts to become great."

Actors seem to agree. Julius Caesar is in rehearsal with Al Pacino and Martin Sheen, each working for $400 a week. Papp is lining up Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline for Much Ado About Nothing, perhaps at the open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where he regularly mounts a summer season. And A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose opening last week officially launched the series, features F. Murray Abraham (Oscar winner for Amadeus), Elizabeth McGovern (Ragtime, Ordinary People) and Carl Lumbly (TV's Cagney and Lacey).

Director A.J. Antoon has placed the action in Bahia in northern Brazil at the turn of the century. The play's divisions between city and forest, between earthbound mortals and ethereal spirits thus become racial differences as well. White colonial masters stumble through the enchanted wood uncomprehendingly, while brown and black aborigines, attuned to the realm of magic, dance to throbbing Afro-Brazilian music and cast voodoo spells.

The transplanting does no violence to Shakespeare's intentions, although some of the erratically varying performances do. Among the high spots: Lumbly's liltingly Caribbean and muscular Oberon and Lorraine Toussaint's Titania, his equal in dignity and a nonpareil in languorous erotic indulgence. Bottom (Abraham) and his pals, the "rude mechanicals," are for once believable working men, unpatronizingly evoked if, alas, therefore a little less funny than usual. This Midsummer will not stand in memory with Peter Brook's 1971 landmark staging or Liviu Ciulei's 1985 war of the sexes. But it is a vibrant start to a welcome project.